Just one of many tragedies bound to one of the biggest problems in modern society – obsession to victims. Framing yourself or others as a victim gives you complete immunity and frees you from any responsibility for the consequences of your actions. This obsession has a potential to end the world we know.
I find it ironic that much of the reason why Arday received such accolades is that he painted himself as a victim who had managed, through grit and determination, to overcome adversity and achieve greatness. But then as soon as he experienced actual adversity - albeit self-inflicted, from being called out on his plagiarism and lies and harassment of those who tried to expose this - he decided to kill himself instead.
Which, I suppose, is the final chapter to his false victim narrative. A posthumous legacy that he was bullied to death, absolved of his misdeeds.
A tragedy all around. Most obviously for Jason Arday, who, regardless of which interpretations of everything else one takes, saw this end as the only way out of a high profile media situation.
When one's whole career and self-image has been based in academia and then the academic career ends, it can easily give a feeling of failure and worthlessness, even in the most normal circumstances.
I couldn't find statistics about postdocs or tenure-track professors, but this meta-study on PhD students and medical residents gives a suicide attempt rate of 0.8%.
Academia isn’t the criminal justice system though, if you have, for example, cheated on your doctorate you can hold your hands up and admit it and do another doctorate.
> The overall prevalence of SA [suicide attempts] in our aggregate sample was .8%. These figures approached the prevalence of SA in Americans aged 18–39 (1.0%) and in the general population of adults over 18 (.6%).
Academia is brutal, but let’s not conflate legitimate struggles in an academic career with being caught allegedly just making up a whole bunch of stuff
Poor guy, no life deserves this ending. He got caught up deeper and deeper in his proclamations, painted himself into a corner, and wasn't able to reset.
Does anyone know of a case where someone went through a reset and came out strong after such a "downfall"?
You don't have to look back very far. Tessier-Lavigne turned his forced resignation after being behind some of the largest research fraud in biotech history into one of the biggest raises (over $1 billion) in biotech history, pretty much immediately after he had been caught.
The whole thing is a tragedy. Nobody wants to see a situation end like this.
There are other likely victims here too though including those who were passed over for roles or promotions based on the alleged false claims, exaggerations and plagiarism. Those are harder to identify and quantify but still a very real thing that has deep impact on people’s lives.
For whatever he did, he never needed to be the product of an international pile-on. Even having known and read about this feels like being a party to a tragedy.
The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection. Which means you can use the courts to silence the press, as Russian oligarchs have been doing for many years:
> Government vows to stop Russian oligarchs ‘abusing’ British courts. Dominic Raab said the government was ‘taking action’ to end the ‘bullying’ to ‘protect our free press’
> The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection.
This is completely untrue, as you can confirm by googling.
The UK has historically had a problem with overly restrictive libel laws and libel tourism, but that point can be made without making statements that are obviously false.
Yes, the First Amendment is unusually permissive. But the sentence "the UK has no legal freedom of speech protection" isn't sensible way to make that point. We're commenting on events which have received extensive (and probably disproportionate) coverage in the UK press, despite the best efforts of Arday and Cambridge. Clearly, their scheme to exploit UK law to silence the press didn't work out.
Also, on a minor note, this is an article about something that happened in the UK. An American viewpoint is as valid as any other, but it's not the most relevant here.
He did not need to take his own life. There was definitely a path for his life to continue. His family still loved him. Sure, he wouldn't have the cushy professorship and the prestige and the book deal and speaking engagements. But there have been people who have fallen from grace harder and faster, for much worse reasons, and they have come back.
It is very sad that Arday took his life for what was at most a temporary setback. R.I.P.
> It is very sad that Arday took his life for what was at most a temporary setback.
I hope you and others realize that he was being relentlessly harassed. I highly doubt the academic job was the only thing causing him distress. His claims were questionable at best but not worthy of the vitriol he received.
He was subject to intense public and media scrutiny due to the uncovering of his wrongdoing and his recalcitrant non-apology.
He wasn't some rando, he was one of Cambridge University's "star" professors. His appointment was heralded in the media as hugely important. He guest-edited the BBC's flagship Today programme. He became a cultural advisor for ITV. He was a media celebrity... on the basis of what is likely an invented life story.
There is a genuine public interest in further investigation. For the past 3 years he and his college actively suppressed inquiries about his plagiarism using reputation management lawyers and false claims of harassment to the police.
I know exactly who he was, the accusations against him, and the likelihood that he lied and misrepresented many aspects of his personal history. Still doesn’t justify the pile-on and relentless racially-tinged harassment. He was an academic for fucksake, not a politician or a world leader.
We live in a bizarre world where far too many people believe that harassment is permissible if someone is famous, in the public eye, or if they’ve done something wrong. Yes, his claims and credentials should have been investigated (and done so years ago) but, again, none of this justifies relentless harassment.
That others have been publicly shamed and harassed in the past does not justify this public shaming and harassment. That others did not take their life over it does not make this public shaming and harassment somehow okay.
It is very possible to believe that Arday misrepresented himself AND ALSO believe that the harassment against him was unwarranted. I personally would have much rather seen all that energy funneled into pressure on the institution — Cambridge and the other universities he worked at — to be transparent about their hiring practices and answer for clear inconsistencies in Arday’s work history.
The claims of harassment came from him, and began long before this became sensationalized. Certainly the claimed harassment before the public scrutiny is highly suspect, and in some cases already shown to be utter fabrications, such as the pig head that he claimed he was sent. And reading between the lines, the harassment that Cambridge and his family has claimed seems to be them simply parroting claims he made privately to them, i.e. highly suspect.
This psychologically impaired, pathological liar deftly leveraged DEI narratives and caricatures of racism to simultaneously aggrandize and shield himself from scrutiny. There are many people like him in this world. The reality of pathological liars is far more complicated than what people expect; these people are rarely malicious, and can seem (and legitimately be, until challenged) nice people. And the emotional pain they feel is no less real, and often more intense, than normal people. This guy happened to be black and figured out how to use white guilt to almost comical ends, but this type of person is usually quietly shown the door before things blow up so spectacularly. (Often the public ire ends up being about why authorities quietly showed these people the door, especially when they find new people and groups to dupe. Often part of the reasoning is concern about psychological fragility and being responsible for creating an even bigger mess.) The credulity exhibited by Cambridge is, IMO, patently racist. Whatever racial harassment he experienced after things became public pales in comparison to Cambridge and his supporters elevating this psychologically ill man into the position he reached. He was treated as a black avatar rather than a human being.
Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.
There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story.
Indeed. It's a disaster for any minority or outsider trying to build a pathway for themselves, as well as people working in the 'soft' sciences; no matter how rigorous the qualitative methods a researcher uses, the additional effort involved in explaining/understanding them vs quantitative methods leads to reflexive dismissal from many.
> imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story
Honestly, I hope nothing like that happens. It would be outrageously racist to say "There was that one fabulist black person in academia, here's a different black person applying for a job in academica, therefore they must also be a fabulist". How on earth could you justify that thought?
I think any applicant's work should speak for itself, it should be based on their papers published, their impact and reach, and if they're teaching staff, the aggregate reviews left by their students.
I'm not sure I'd be a fair judge in a sociology department, because I'm on Sokal's side in the Sokal hoax and think appointments in humanities departments run on bullshit and social networking, not hard data.
I think there are a lot more white bullshitters in UK sociology departments right now, and they think the equitable thing to do is to try to skew that social networking to admit more black people. I think the right thing to do is to put a hard ban on the social networking aspect of academic recruitment and promotion, and run the all the bullshitters out of town.
If the bar was provably lowered for him due to an attribute [0], then doesn't that invite scrutiny on others with the same attribute? To your critique, the attribute could be political affiliation, familial relationships, academic lineage, social circles, nationality, <your choice>.
Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.
By harrassment do you mean public exposure of his lies that earned him his fame ?
What is the alternative you propose ? Cover up ? Look the other way ? Become an enabler of such behavior ?
Shaming is one of society's feedback mechanisms to discourage dishonest behavior. It has its place.
Granted that the standards used by a society at any point in time may not be a universal standard. Case in point Turing. In that case, it is the society that gets shamed later.
>Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.
His logic is probably, "arguments are soldiers": the enemy is trying to make my side look bad; neutralizing that enemy action takes priority over everything else.
In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.
I can't read this post, but you need to go to the source it's quoting: https://youtu.be/9ZDTBqb8Juo?t=1611 -- Cofnas is joking with the interviewer. He doesn't think such a position exists or would ever exist, it's a joke and/or outrage bait for clipping up. His actual views, the ones that got him fired, are ugly enough.
His actual motivation is completely straightforward: R E V E N G E
He got sacked from Emmanuel College (part of University of Cambridge) in 2024 due to the public uproar against his published blog posts, and in particular the college's reasoning was that his blogpost was a "rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion". That's right, Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you. So Cofnas's motivation is to:
1) get back at the University of Cambridge for sacking him
2) bring DEI into disrepute and get everyone to reject it
You then have to ask the more pertinent question. Why did Cofnas know to look for plagiarism in Arday's work? SOMEONE AT CAMBRIDGE TOLD HIM TO.
The anonymous member of faculty did so because they knew all about Arday's dubious academic output and did not like that the university had brushed it under the carpet.
Both Arday and his employer had numerous opportunities to be honest and open about it, but they suppressed it and called the police and lawyers on good-faith academics and journalists.
So what's Cambridge University's motivation for doing that? Simple: they wanted to protect their "star professor" who appears so often on TV, radio and in the press, to hide the fact that only 75 out of the 6180 academics at Cambridge are black, and they are actually a bastion of white upper-class privilege. Even though they know he's a plagiarist and a fabulist, and if everyone learned that truth, it'd bring all academics and universities into disrepute.
This tragedy was entirely of their own making. I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.
Cofnas is completely justified in wanting to get back at the University of Cambridge for (de-facto) sacking him, and for wanting to bring DEI into disrepute, including by naming and shaming specific black people who are incompetent or fraudulent DEI hires. Of course Cofnas is not the only person who wants to do this, nor the only person who has some kind of personal grievance related to affirmative action hiring.
> Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you
I don't really see anything wrong with that. But then I'm not an nazi, so what do I know.
> I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.
Of course that won't happen, once an institution is rotten there is no saving it. But also we shouldn't allow nazis hunting people they don't like for whatever reason.
I'm not a Nazi either, but you should not accept EDI/DEI unconditionally, nor accept that what your employer is doing in pursuit of those aims is legal. For example, the RAF unlawfully discriminated against white male candidates: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490
Imagine a world where anyone who made a criticism of this illegal discrimination was sacked instead of being listened to, and the illegal discrimination just continued.
Nonetheless, I'm very much against what Cofnas has to say, and I don't believe there is a genetic basis for success at university. There is IQ variation no matter how you group people, but to me it seems much more the case that cultures which value education have parents that push their children to succeed, and those that don't, don't. Sometimes you get children who enter academia despite their parents' views, but you get more people from families where their parents encourage that type of career. You also get more people entering academia if they can afford to, and aren't sidetracked into having to get a unskilled job immediately, or enter into caring for family immediately, because the family is poor. To fix this, we not only need to change the attitudes of children and their families and encourage them towards a career in higher education, and also fund those whose families can't afford higher education (grants not loans!), so they're on an equal footing with affluent families, and we also need to break the gatekeeping of academic incumbents who prefer to select people who look like them, have a similar cultural background to them, and/or agree with them.
His claims of harassment also turned out to be lies, FWIW. He made a lot of false claims, like saying someone had delivered bullets and a severed pigs head to his parent's home that he had "intercepted" and that the police had identified the specific butchers it came from. The Guardian somewhat surprisingly double checked and uncovered that he was making that stuff up too. When they challenged him he said "I thought you'd just believe me".
Arday tried to ruin a journalist's life with police complaints that the police pursued without following proper protocols. The police issued a public apology [0].
Everyone deserves compassion. I feel sorry for him. But the fact remains, that he deliberately used lies and deception to gain a high social position in a very politically derisive context. It couldn’t have come as a surprise, that every single racist out there would jump at the opportunity to pull him down should there ever be doubt about his academic work. Plus the people, who really care about academic integrity. Plus a whole lot of folks who simply do not like people blatantly lying for massive personal gains. The vitriol was entirely predictable. The internet is not known for being forgiving. He very deliberately and knowingly took a huge and, given the absurdity of some of his claims, unfounded risk the materialization of which he could not handle. I do feel sorry for him to have started on this path. What state of mind would push a person to take such risk? He must have been a tortured man long before it all exploded into the open.
I’ve found a disturbing pattern of “I’m being harassed” (without explanation of what exactly that means) as a sort of blanket statement to discount any kind of questions or scrutiny.
The idea of someone having to explain what harassment is occurring is of course unpleasant, but that’s also what makes it an effective method of trying to distract from the topic.
If he was being harassed that’s wrong, but it doesn’t make him immune from questions about other things.
cool guess! idk about jason arday, but that dude in the first link is strange and off putting. too much stink face, and the way he frames the subject with the blurry photos and loony screenshots feels like bullying.
The whole tale reminded me of the case of George Santos (Or, Scamtos, as he's known since then). Regardless of the facts, the way this ended up is tragic.
Regarding the tragedy, grandiose narcissists usually have very vulnerable egos and cannot bear exposure. Their entire notion of self is held together by their grandiosity.
The tragic part is that most narcissists are produced by a bad childhood, starved of approval and safety.
FWIW Dr. Grande's videos were instrumental in helping me understand and escape narcissistic abuse. At least from what I've seen (it's been a few years since I watched regularly), he's a straight shooter.
Many of the comments here in this thread are absolutely vile. Very few people are undeserving of compassion.
I think some of the people in this thread should look themselves in the mirror and ask why feel different in this case than similar cases like Dan Ariely, Amy Cuddy, or Marc Tessier Levigne.
I don’t know. Seems like a distorted sense of justice to me. I am not so sure that academic fraud is in the same league as committing felonies (like E Holmes). Also don’t know that anything beyond professional sanction is deserved for professional misconduct (that is not breaking any laws or endangering people).
Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm. Whatever it was, it really seems to have brought out the worst (in) people.
Academic fraud is a crime. It gets used on grant applications to justify funding, meaning it's stealing money from the government and thus the public. It can be prosecuted as fraud in the courts. See the case of the Dana Farber Cancer Center being taken to court on behalf of the US Government by Sholto David (who won a large settlement).
> Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm.
He hired Carter Ruck, a professional law firm, who then bullied The Times with legal threats that themselves contained by lies by Arday. And he had been given nothing less than glowing PR by every "serious" institution in Britain, which all repeated his lies without question up until a few days ago.
Good PR and funds for crisis management were not an issue for him.
I don't agree. In one case a person is raising financial capital, in others they're raising social or political capital. All such frauds upon the public are bad and I think there's something wrong with society only treating it as a crime when a currency symbol is involved. It's not just the investors (financial or professional or...) who lose out; people who were correctly skeptical in advance of the public revelation are often attacked or sidelined for expressing doubt about a fabricator's grandiose claims.
Just one of many tragedies bound to one of the biggest problems in modern society – obsession to victims. Framing yourself or others as a victim gives you complete immunity and frees you from any responsibility for the consequences of your actions. This obsession has a potential to end the world we know.
I find it ironic that much of the reason why Arday received such accolades is that he painted himself as a victim who had managed, through grit and determination, to overcome adversity and achieve greatness. But then as soon as he experienced actual adversity - albeit self-inflicted, from being called out on his plagiarism and lies and harassment of those who tried to expose this - he decided to kill himself instead.
Which, I suppose, is the final chapter to his false victim narrative. A posthumous legacy that he was bullied to death, absolved of his misdeeds.
Completely agree
A tragedy all around. Most obviously for Jason Arday, who, regardless of which interpretations of everything else one takes, saw this end as the only way out of a high profile media situation.
When one's whole career and self-image has been based in academia and then the academic career ends, it can easily give a feeling of failure and worthlessness, even in the most normal circumstances.
I couldn't find statistics about postdocs or tenure-track professors, but this meta-study on PhD students and medical residents gives a suicide attempt rate of 0.8%.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002239562...
Academia isn’t the criminal justice system though, if you have, for example, cheated on your doctorate you can hold your hands up and admit it and do another doctorate.
Good luck getting accepted in another program.
From the same article:
> The overall prevalence of SA [suicide attempts] in our aggregate sample was .8%. These figures approached the prevalence of SA in Americans aged 18–39 (1.0%) and in the general population of adults over 18 (.6%).
Academia is brutal, but let’s not conflate legitimate struggles in an academic career with being caught allegedly just making up a whole bunch of stuff
They gave him a professorship instead of treatment.
Poor guy, no life deserves this ending. He got caught up deeper and deeper in his proclamations, painted himself into a corner, and wasn't able to reset.
Does anyone know of a case where someone went through a reset and came out strong after such a "downfall"?
One in the White House ? Coming out stronger, that is. No reset.
A more serious example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Cummines
Woah. Never heard of him but that's a hell of a ride through life. Adding I Am Not a Gangster to my reading list.
You don't have to look back very far. Tessier-Lavigne turned his forced resignation after being behind some of the largest research fraud in biotech history into one of the biggest raises (over $1 billion) in biotech history, pretty much immediately after he had been caught.
The whole thing is a tragedy. Nobody wants to see a situation end like this.
There are other likely victims here too though including those who were passed over for roles or promotions based on the alleged false claims, exaggerations and plagiarism. Those are harder to identify and quantify but still a very real thing that has deep impact on people’s lives.
For whatever he did, he never needed to be the product of an international pile-on. Even having known and read about this feels like being a party to a tragedy.
He did claim harassment with the police against the journalist who was initally investigating him: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo Now consider that this was in UK.
Uh, what about it being in the uk? I guess I've heard the press can be aggressive, but not sure if that's what you meant.
The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection. Which means you can use the courts to silence the press, as Russian oligarchs have been doing for many years:
> Government vows to stop Russian oligarchs ‘abusing’ British courts. Dominic Raab said the government was ‘taking action’ to end the ‘bullying’ to ‘protect our free press’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/russia-ukrain...
> UK vows to stop the super-rich using courts to silence critics
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60773942
> The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection.
This is completely untrue, as you can confirm by googling.
The UK has historically had a problem with overly restrictive libel laws and libel tourism, but that point can be made without making statements that are obviously false.
From an American viewpoint, no one else has “free speech”, UK included. The First Amendment is globally unique. So it’s a matter of definitions.
> The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides almost absolute protection to freedom of expression. By contrast, European and EU law curtails the right to freedom of expression. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7728...
> From an American viewpoint, no one else has “free speech”, UK included.
That's funny as we see what happens regularly to people trying to exercise their free speech right against a small country in the middle east.
Yes, the First Amendment is unusually permissive. But the sentence "the UK has no legal freedom of speech protection" isn't sensible way to make that point. We're commenting on events which have received extensive (and probably disproportionate) coverage in the UK press, despite the best efforts of Arday and Cambridge. Clearly, their scheme to exploit UK law to silence the press didn't work out.
Also, on a minor note, this is an article about something that happened in the UK. An American viewpoint is as valid as any other, but it's not the most relevant here.
Had Cambridge applied the appropriate sanctions against Arday, the story would never have blown up like it did. Unfortunate
This is a tragedy.
He did not need to take his own life. There was definitely a path for his life to continue. His family still loved him. Sure, he wouldn't have the cushy professorship and the prestige and the book deal and speaking engagements. But there have been people who have fallen from grace harder and faster, for much worse reasons, and they have come back.
It is very sad that Arday took his life for what was at most a temporary setback. R.I.P.
> It is very sad that Arday took his life for what was at most a temporary setback.
I hope you and others realize that he was being relentlessly harassed. I highly doubt the academic job was the only thing causing him distress. His claims were questionable at best but not worthy of the vitriol he received.
He was subject to intense public and media scrutiny due to the uncovering of his wrongdoing and his recalcitrant non-apology.
He wasn't some rando, he was one of Cambridge University's "star" professors. His appointment was heralded in the media as hugely important. He guest-edited the BBC's flagship Today programme. He became a cultural advisor for ITV. He was a media celebrity... on the basis of what is likely an invented life story.
There is a genuine public interest in further investigation. For the past 3 years he and his college actively suppressed inquiries about his plagiarism using reputation management lawyers and false claims of harassment to the police.
He should have read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham... and what happened to Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer is still shamed for plagiarism and his career has not recovered... but he is still alive.
I know exactly who he was, the accusations against him, and the likelihood that he lied and misrepresented many aspects of his personal history. Still doesn’t justify the pile-on and relentless racially-tinged harassment. He was an academic for fucksake, not a politician or a world leader.
We live in a bizarre world where far too many people believe that harassment is permissible if someone is famous, in the public eye, or if they’ve done something wrong. Yes, his claims and credentials should have been investigated (and done so years ago) but, again, none of this justifies relentless harassment.
That others have been publicly shamed and harassed in the past does not justify this public shaming and harassment. That others did not take their life over it does not make this public shaming and harassment somehow okay.
It is very possible to believe that Arday misrepresented himself AND ALSO believe that the harassment against him was unwarranted. I personally would have much rather seen all that energy funneled into pressure on the institution — Cambridge and the other universities he worked at — to be transparent about their hiring practices and answer for clear inconsistencies in Arday’s work history.
The claims of harassment came from him, and began long before this became sensationalized. Certainly the claimed harassment before the public scrutiny is highly suspect, and in some cases already shown to be utter fabrications, such as the pig head that he claimed he was sent. And reading between the lines, the harassment that Cambridge and his family has claimed seems to be them simply parroting claims he made privately to them, i.e. highly suspect.
This psychologically impaired, pathological liar deftly leveraged DEI narratives and caricatures of racism to simultaneously aggrandize and shield himself from scrutiny. There are many people like him in this world. The reality of pathological liars is far more complicated than what people expect; these people are rarely malicious, and can seem (and legitimately be, until challenged) nice people. And the emotional pain they feel is no less real, and often more intense, than normal people. This guy happened to be black and figured out how to use white guilt to almost comical ends, but this type of person is usually quietly shown the door before things blow up so spectacularly. (Often the public ire ends up being about why authorities quietly showed these people the door, especially when they find new people and groups to dupe. Often part of the reasoning is concern about psychological fragility and being responsible for creating an even bigger mess.) The credulity exhibited by Cambridge is, IMO, patently racist. Whatever racial harassment he experienced after things became public pales in comparison to Cambridge and his supporters elevating this psychologically ill man into the position he reached. He was treated as a black avatar rather than a human being.
Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.
There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story.
Indeed. It's a disaster for any minority or outsider trying to build a pathway for themselves, as well as people working in the 'soft' sciences; no matter how rigorous the qualitative methods a researcher uses, the additional effort involved in explaining/understanding them vs quantitative methods leads to reflexive dismissal from many.
> imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story
Honestly, I hope nothing like that happens. It would be outrageously racist to say "There was that one fabulist black person in academia, here's a different black person applying for a job in academica, therefore they must also be a fabulist". How on earth could you justify that thought?
I think any applicant's work should speak for itself, it should be based on their papers published, their impact and reach, and if they're teaching staff, the aggregate reviews left by their students.
I'm not sure I'd be a fair judge in a sociology department, because I'm on Sokal's side in the Sokal hoax and think appointments in humanities departments run on bullshit and social networking, not hard data.
I think there are a lot more white bullshitters in UK sociology departments right now, and they think the equitable thing to do is to try to skew that social networking to admit more black people. I think the right thing to do is to put a hard ban on the social networking aspect of academic recruitment and promotion, and run the all the bullshitters out of town.
> therefore they must also be a fabulist"
"must" is over-stating the parent's point.
If the bar was provably lowered for him due to an attribute [0], then doesn't that invite scrutiny on others with the same attribute? To your critique, the attribute could be political affiliation, familial relationships, academic lineage, social circles, nationality, <your choice>.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/world/europe/jason-arday-...
Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.
By harrassment do you mean public exposure of his lies that earned him his fame ?
What is the alternative you propose ? Cover up ? Look the other way ? Become an enabler of such behavior ?
Shaming is one of society's feedback mechanisms to discourage dishonest behavior. It has its place.
Granted that the standards used by a society at any point in time may not be a universal standard. Case in point Turing. In that case, it is the society that gets shamed later.
Arday was no Turing.
>Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.
His logic is probably, "arguments are soldiers": the enemy is trying to make my side look bad; neutralizing that enemy action takes priority over everything else.
In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.
https://bsky.app/profile/kohngregory.bsky.social/post/3mt3ci...
I can't read this post, but you need to go to the source it's quoting: https://youtu.be/9ZDTBqb8Juo?t=1611 -- Cofnas is joking with the interviewer. He doesn't think such a position exists or would ever exist, it's a joke and/or outrage bait for clipping up. His actual views, the ones that got him fired, are ugly enough.
His actual motivation is completely straightforward: R E V E N G E
He got sacked from Emmanuel College (part of University of Cambridge) in 2024 due to the public uproar against his published blog posts, and in particular the college's reasoning was that his blogpost was a "rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion". That's right, Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you. So Cofnas's motivation is to:
1) get back at the University of Cambridge for sacking him
2) bring DEI into disrepute and get everyone to reject it
You then have to ask the more pertinent question. Why did Cofnas know to look for plagiarism in Arday's work? SOMEONE AT CAMBRIDGE TOLD HIM TO.
The anonymous member of faculty did so because they knew all about Arday's dubious academic output and did not like that the university had brushed it under the carpet.
Both Arday and his employer had numerous opportunities to be honest and open about it, but they suppressed it and called the police and lawyers on good-faith academics and journalists.
So what's Cambridge University's motivation for doing that? Simple: they wanted to protect their "star professor" who appears so often on TV, radio and in the press, to hide the fact that only 75 out of the 6180 academics at Cambridge are black, and they are actually a bastion of white upper-class privilege. Even though they know he's a plagiarist and a fabulist, and if everyone learned that truth, it'd bring all academics and universities into disrepute.
This tragedy was entirely of their own making. I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.
> He got sacked from Emmanuel College
This sounds worse than reality.
That was an unpaid research affiliation, while he was holding a separate, paid research fellow position at Cambridge.
Cambridge didn't fire him from his paid job, which was a terminal, three-year fellowship. [0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Cofnas#Academic_career
Cofnas is completely justified in wanting to get back at the University of Cambridge for (de-facto) sacking him, and for wanting to bring DEI into disrepute, including by naming and shaming specific black people who are incompetent or fraudulent DEI hires. Of course Cofnas is not the only person who wants to do this, nor the only person who has some kind of personal grievance related to affirmative action hiring.
> Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you
I don't really see anything wrong with that. But then I'm not an nazi, so what do I know.
> I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.
Of course that won't happen, once an institution is rotten there is no saving it. But also we shouldn't allow nazis hunting people they don't like for whatever reason.
I'm not a Nazi either, but you should not accept EDI/DEI unconditionally, nor accept that what your employer is doing in pursuit of those aims is legal. For example, the RAF unlawfully discriminated against white male candidates: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490
Imagine a world where anyone who made a criticism of this illegal discrimination was sacked instead of being listened to, and the illegal discrimination just continued.
Nonetheless, I'm very much against what Cofnas has to say, and I don't believe there is a genetic basis for success at university. There is IQ variation no matter how you group people, but to me it seems much more the case that cultures which value education have parents that push their children to succeed, and those that don't, don't. Sometimes you get children who enter academia despite their parents' views, but you get more people from families where their parents encourage that type of career. You also get more people entering academia if they can afford to, and aren't sidetracked into having to get a unskilled job immediately, or enter into caring for family immediately, because the family is poor. To fix this, we not only need to change the attitudes of children and their families and encourage them towards a career in higher education, and also fund those whose families can't afford higher education (grants not loans!), so they're on an equal footing with affluent families, and we also need to break the gatekeeping of academic incumbents who prefer to select people who look like them, have a similar cultural background to them, and/or agree with them.
That sounds suspiciously close to DEI :)
His claims of harassment also turned out to be lies, FWIW. He made a lot of false claims, like saying someone had delivered bullets and a severed pigs head to his parent's home that he had "intercepted" and that the police had identified the specific butchers it came from. The Guardian somewhat surprisingly double checked and uncovered that he was making that stuff up too. When they challenged him he said "I thought you'd just believe me".
Worse.
Arday tried to ruin a journalist's life with police complaints that the police pursued without following proper protocols. The police issued a public apology [0].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Everyone deserves compassion. I feel sorry for him. But the fact remains, that he deliberately used lies and deception to gain a high social position in a very politically derisive context. It couldn’t have come as a surprise, that every single racist out there would jump at the opportunity to pull him down should there ever be doubt about his academic work. Plus the people, who really care about academic integrity. Plus a whole lot of folks who simply do not like people blatantly lying for massive personal gains. The vitriol was entirely predictable. The internet is not known for being forgiving. He very deliberately and knowingly took a huge and, given the absurdity of some of his claims, unfounded risk the materialization of which he could not handle. I do feel sorry for him to have started on this path. What state of mind would push a person to take such risk? He must have been a tortured man long before it all exploded into the open.
I’ve found a disturbing pattern of “I’m being harassed” (without explanation of what exactly that means) as a sort of blanket statement to discount any kind of questions or scrutiny.
The idea of someone having to explain what harassment is occurring is of course unpleasant, but that’s also what makes it an effective method of trying to distract from the topic.
If he was being harassed that’s wrong, but it doesn’t make him immune from questions about other things.
That is his words, but no evidence. He should have resigned since, and accepted his frailties. That way he could have found strength to rebuild.
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cool guess! idk about jason arday, but that dude in the first link is strange and off putting. too much stink face, and the way he frames the subject with the blurry photos and loony screenshots feels like bullying.
commenter changed their comment and /s blew right by
Pretty sure we've seen Elon there.
The whole tale reminded me of the case of George Santos (Or, Scamtos, as he's known since then). Regardless of the facts, the way this ended up is tragic.
Good example.
Regarding the tragedy, grandiose narcissists usually have very vulnerable egos and cannot bear exposure. Their entire notion of self is held together by their grandiosity.
The tragic part is that most narcissists are produced by a bad childhood, starved of approval and safety.
FWIW Dr. Grande's videos were instrumental in helping me understand and escape narcissistic abuse. At least from what I've seen (it's been a few years since I watched regularly), he's a straight shooter.
I have been following this in English news. It is terribly sad.
The University of Cambridge is largely to blame for letting this troubled person dig himself in so deep.
His astounding claims were astonishing and easily falsifiable. Journalists had no such trouble.
They raised him up then when he got too hot cast him down.
He was a fantasist, he deserves some blame, but it was Cambridge with the power, and irresponsible hubris
RIP
Many of the comments here in this thread are absolutely vile. Very few people are undeserving of compassion.
I think some of the people in this thread should look themselves in the mirror and ask why feel different in this case than similar cases like Dan Ariely, Amy Cuddy, or Marc Tessier Levigne.
Dan despicable Ariely is a good example because he also milked personal tragedies.
Ariely et al that you mention weren't questioned or exposed any less though. There was Elizabeth Holmes too.
The point is, if you cannot bear getting exposed as a false god, as a con, then don't try to become one. Well don't, even you can bear the exposure.
I don’t know. Seems like a distorted sense of justice to me. I am not so sure that academic fraud is in the same league as committing felonies (like E Holmes). Also don’t know that anything beyond professional sanction is deserved for professional misconduct (that is not breaking any laws or endangering people).
Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm. Whatever it was, it really seems to have brought out the worst (in) people.
Academic fraud is a crime. It gets used on grant applications to justify funding, meaning it's stealing money from the government and thus the public. It can be prosecuted as fraud in the courts. See the case of the Dana Farber Cancer Center being taken to court on behalf of the US Government by Sholto David (who won a large settlement).
> Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm.
He hired Carter Ruck, a professional law firm, who then bullied The Times with legal threats that themselves contained by lies by Arday. And he had been given nothing less than glowing PR by every "serious" institution in Britain, which all repeated his lies without question up until a few days ago.
Good PR and funds for crisis management were not an issue for him.
I don't agree. In one case a person is raising financial capital, in others they're raising social or political capital. All such frauds upon the public are bad and I think there's something wrong with society only treating it as a crime when a currency symbol is involved. It's not just the investors (financial or professional or...) who lose out; people who were correctly skeptical in advance of the public revelation are often attacked or sidelined for expressing doubt about a fabricator's grandiose claims.